December 10, 2007

Trans-Siberian Orchestra @ The Sprint Center

Metallica meets the Boston Pops. TSO put on a spectacular show Saturday afternoon at the Sprint Center. This concert was like seeing Van Halen wearing tuxedos and playing heavy metal Christmas carols in front of a string section. But the music was great and the stage effects were awesome. One curious aspect: The band has a woman who plays violin, and she was all over the stage pulling that bow up and down on her electric fiddle. However, we had a hard time actually hearing her. We wondered later if she was actually playing the thing or just putting on a show.

The photos here I had to take with my cell phone. They are not exactly clear but you can get a general idea.

I must tell the story of our adventure into the Sprint Center, the new Massive Glass Bubble in downtown Kansas City. This was our first venture into the place, and it looks good from the street but… Anyway, more on the Sprint later. This story is about our seating. When we scanned in our tickets an alarm went off. We went with a friend of Lucy’s from work and her husband. He went in first and the scanner buzzed with a warning, saying that our seats had been “reassigned.”

We had heard stories from earlier events – the place only opened a few months ago – where people were somehow sold seats that didn’t exist. You know how these things only happen to other people. Well I don’t know if our seat numbers didn’t exist or were somehow double sold. I tend to think the latter. Anyway, we had to go to the box office and get our new tickets. By the time we sat down we’d missed about 10-15 minutes of the show.

We were pissed that we had to get new tickets and missed the opening, but the seats to which we were reassigned were 14th row on the floor – center. And nobody sat in front of Lucy. She’s not very tall and she doesn’t like floor seats because Wilt Chamberlain’s relatives tend to sit in front of her. So, once we got to our seats we had a prime location to really enjoy the lasers and pyrotechnics, not to mention the music.

I’m not a construction expert, I just play one on the internet, but I was not impressed once we got inside the Bubble. We agreed that there was evidence of shoddy construction. However, the place served our purposes well today; maybe I’m just getting caught up in the general dissatisfaction as reported by the KC media. I’ve read complaints in the KC Star more than once about the manual toilet flushers. Some folks can’t believe that they didn’t put in automatic flushers.

The Sprint was built for basketball though, and I would love to take in a hoops game there sometime. The TSO guy said that they sold out 24,000 seats for the show this afternoon. They did a second show that same evening at 8pm. So I guess they’ll take home some cash.

I wonder if the nickname will simply be “the Sprint?” I think they should call it “The Bubble.” That’s what it looks like – at least to me.